The present invention relates to a processing method, a processing system, and a computer program for a time-series analysis of keywords.
As computer networks have spread and the performance of computer systems has been improved, access to a huge amount of electronic document data (hereinafter called document data) has been facilitated. In this regard, a document data search enables the location of necessary document data in a huge amount of document data. Moreover, a document data search can be performed on various types of objects. For example, in the case of search engines in Internet browsers, document data (for example, web pages) on the Internet can be searched. As another example, in companies, document data (for example, reports and web pages) on intranets can be searched to accumulate results of searched document data in business operations.
One web search service usable on the Internet or intranets, can check the trend of a specific search keyword. Correspondingly, trends in searches can be determined by checking trends in search keywords. In a service for checking trends, search keywords that are currently searched for many times are displayed in a ranking. Moreover, in the service, clicking a search result causes a jump to, for example, a detailed page showing the results of news, a blog, a web search, etc., which is related to a corresponding search keyword or fluctuations in the number of searches over time.
A method for finding trends in search keywords includes performing a text analysis of document data, displaying the frequencies of occurrence of search keywords on the time series, and detecting a point where the range of fluctuation sharply changes. In general, in a text analysis, a rather long time is necessary to create indices which are acceptable. For example, one month may be spent to create indices. On the other hand, when a search of web pages or an analysis of trends is performed, a rather quick response is required. For example, in an interactive operation, the response is required to be returned within a few seconds, at least several tens of seconds.